By Pieter Brueghel

In picture i see a man seated next to the bagpipe wears a peacock feather in his hat, a symbol of vanity and pride. The occasion for the peasants’ revelry is a saint’s day, but the dancers turn their backs on the church. It firmly framed by the village houses, seems to be diagonally divided through the middle. The group of drinkers around the table contrasts with the vigorous movement of the dancers in the right foreground, echoed by the couples further back.

The Dance

William Carlos Williams

In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.

The pome describe how they are dancing. That they are going around and around.